Better window management strategies?

Cameron Simpson cs at zip.com.au
Sun May 27 00:18:49 UTC 2007


On 26May2007 12:54, Joe Smith <jes at martnet.com> wrote:
| How do you folks manage your working windows? I find that working on a 
| standard WIMP desktop is a distracting battle of locating and arranging 
| in the needed windows. The current tools, specifically in the default 
| Fedora Gnome desktop are not working well for me, but maybe I've missed 
| something.

I use FVWM. I run a few Gnome tools, but the window manager is FVWM.
Works fine, and allows complete control.

| Here's what I've tried:
| 
| * Focus follows mouse
| I can't stand "click to focus", primarily because it's disruptive to 
| move a window to the top for something simple and then to restore the 
| z-order I had before.

Tick. it's the default undef FVWM, but of course you can choose.
I actually run "SloppyFocus" - focus follows mouse, but you don't loose
focus until the mouse enters another window - drifting onto the root
window leaves the last app focussed.

| Using "focus follows mouse" solves that problem, but I'm left with the 
| converse problem: I often have problems finding the window I need and 
| bringing it to the top when necessary.

I have a fairly rigid desktop layout, with windows usually being full, half
or quadrant sized. So there's little overlapping. I have single keystroke
mapping to move/resize windows to the standard places, and to raise/lower/iconofy windows.

I also run multiple desktops (several) with habitual uses for about 6, so
that I type Alt-F4 to go to desktop 4, where I usually web browse, and so
forth. And I have a tiny shell script to create named desktops for arbitrary
purposes, so for something special I'll allocate a desktop for it. I have a
popup menu with these named desktops listed bound to Alt-D.

| 1. Alt-tab to cyle through windows. This is the exact functionality I 
| need, but having to access it through the keyboard, with a rather 
| awkward key chord is not convenient enough. I want something that will 
| work with the mouse.

Shrug. You can bind that to whatever you like.

| 2. The window-selector panel menu. Better, but it's distracting to use 
| the panel here: it's too far from my working windows and it's 
| complicated to locate the correct button on the panel and select the 
| right window given only their titles.

I popup a list of nicely named window titles with Alt-L. From anywhere.

| 3. Application window menus: these would be ok, except they don't work 
| with Nautilus under "focus follows mouse" (Mozilla Seamonkey and 
| OpenOffice are the two big ones I use, that don't work).

They work for me.

| What might help:
|   * a window menu built-in to the title bar
|   * a method to "restore the previous order", or at least to send the 
| top window down.
| 
| Other suggestions? What obvious solution have I missed?

Use a better window manager. I do!

Small writeup of my setup here, slightly dated:
  http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/fvwm/
Main FVWM web page here:
  http://www.fvwm.org/

Cheers,
-- 
Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> DoD#743
http://www.cskk.ezoshosting.com/cs/

It's not that perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards
idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done.
- Erik Naggum




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